International Institute for Environment and Development - All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Development and the Environment (APPGIDE)Shaping decisions for developmenthttps://www.iied.org/
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Linking local priorities and global challenges6541Copyright 2013 International Institute for Environment and Developmentwebmaster@iied.orgThu, 24 May 2012 15:09:05 +0100Thu, 15 Feb 2018 18:36:06 +0000Moving beyond the preamble to creating a new story at Rio+20https://www.iied.org/moving-beyond-preamble-creating-new-story-rio20
<div class="field field-name-field-standfirst"><p>There’s great divergence amongst UK MPs on their ambitions for the upcoming Rio+20 Summit, a Parliamentary debate chaired by journalist Jon Snow revealed this week.</p></div><p>The panelists, <a href="http://www.tonycunningham.org.uk/">Tony Cunningham MP (Labour)</a>, <a href="http://www.martinhorwood.net/index.php">Martin Horwood MP (Liberal Democrats)</a>, <a href="http://www.carolinelucas.com/cl.html">Caroline Lucas MP (Green)</a>, <a href="http://www.marksimmonds.org/">Mark Simmonds MP (Conservative),</a> <a href="http://www.snp.org/people/dr-eilidh-whiteford">Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Scottish National Party)</a>, represented the main UK parties at the meeting organized by the <a href="http://www.appgide.org/">All Party Group for International Development and the Environment</a>. </p><p>Opening the discussion Mark Simmonds MP called for three key outcomes from Rio+20:</p><ul><li>A set of sustainable development goals (SDGs), structured around the core themes of water, energy and food;</li><li>Progress on GDP+, the term increasingly used to refer to measuring and valuing natural capital and general wellbeing, in addition to Gross Domestic Product, the established financial indicator of the state of a nation’s economy;</li><li>Increasing the role of the private sector in the sustainable development agenda.</li></ul><p>None of the other panelists were going to dispute that these are all areas in which urgent progress is needed. The arguments arose over the question of “how?”. How can the ambitions of the SDGs be achieved? How can we get beyond measuring GDP? How can the private sector be best harnessed as a positive force for sustainable development?</p><p>Unfortunately a lot of the meeting time was consumed by descriptions of the problem, vague statements and misunderstanding. Labour MP Tony Cunningham told the audience, largely made up of development NGO staff, that climate change is “bad and getting worse,” and the effects are worse in Africa than the UK – points that were all patently obvious to the audience. Some corporations were congratulated for leading the way on sustainability but without much exploration of why, and Conservative MP Mark Simmonds erroneously accused Caroline Lucas of advocating no-growth economics in developing countries.</p><p>A few specific policies also got a mention, particularly from Green MP Caroline Lucas and SNP MP Eilidh Whiteford, who both advocated that the UK should stop blocking a European financial transaction tax, which British <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9286541/David-Cameron-promises-to-fight-financial-transactions-tax-all-the-way.html">Prime Minister David Cameron has spoken out strongly against</a>. The two MPs said the government should be pressing for a tax on shipping or aircraft bunker fuel.They argued that the tax could both generate revenues and correct market distortions that make it cheaper for a builder in Scotland to import granite from China than purchase it from local quarries.</p><p>This wasn’t met with agreement from Conservative MP Mark Simmonds, which was characteristic of the differences in the approaches the Parties take to affecting private sector practice. For Simmonds the “maximum engagement of the private sector” is generally achieved through “better information and transparency”.</p><p>Simmonds therefore welcomed the call for a Convention on Corporate Sustainability Reporting in Paragraph 24 of the “Zero Draft” of the Rio+20 Summit and argued that, with better corporate reporting, shareholders could evaluate the sustainability impacts of their investments and make requests or recommendations for improved practice. There was no time to explore just how much impact this proposed Convention could have.</p><p>Simmonds also agreed with Jon Snow that many corporations, such as Unilever and B&Q, are already improving their sustainability standards beyond the requirements set by governments. He argued that rather than burdening businesses with increased regulation, working with those businesses with ambitious sustainability and environmental targets offers the best chance of achieving wider corporate sector change. This was met with some criticism from Green MP Caroline Lucas who said that businesses with strong sustainability agendas are in a minority and the vast majority of corporate sector lobbying runs counter to such interests.</p><h3>Trade and aid</h3><p>Trade and aid also featured strongly in the discussion, with Jon Snow seeking confirmation from Liberal Democrat MP Martin Horwood that Nick Clegg would use the Rio+20 summit as an opportunity to press other countries to match the UK’s 0.7% of GDP aid spending commitment.</p><p>Conservative MP Mark Simmonds added that to get maximum impact from the aid budget it should be used to “leverage” private sector finance, which prompted Labour MP Tony Cunningham to respond that ensuring private companies pay their taxes on operations in developing countries would be a further way to increase the role of the private sector in development.</p><h3>Clean and renewable energy</h3><p>Green MP Caroline Lucas also highlighted that fossil fuel subsidies undermine investment in clean energy and correcting such imbalances is another key dimension of public sector influence over private sector practice to achieve sustainable development.</p><p>On renewable energy SNP MP Eilidh Whiteford commented on the growing local level investment in wind turbines in her constituency region of Aberdeenshire. She said this exemplified how renewable energy technology can be welcomed by communities, even in the UK. Martin Horwood added that in Denmark, wind farms were widely welcomed because they were community, rather than corporate-led, projects. Mark Simmonds responded that there would be deep hostility to wind farms in his Lincolnshire constituency regardless of who initiated the project.</p><p>Returning to the subject of the Summit, Caroline Lucas suggested that the UK Government, with its interest in measuring wealth in natural capital, not just GDP, should further explore the idea of <a href="http://steadystate.org/discover/definition/">steady state economics</a> in rich developed countries, a term used to refer to an economy of relatively stable size that features a stable population and stable levels of consumption.</p><p>MP Mark Simmonds misunderstood her comment and argued that pursuing no growth economics would not leave developing countries with any hope of addressing the problems of large-scale poverty.All the panelists were agreed on the scale and importance of tackling climate change and global environmental degradation and resource loss. Poverty alleviation has to be at the heart of addressing these challenges, they said, and emphatic iterations of these concerns littered the debate.</p><p>But, to bring about effective global action to overcome the environmental and development challenges the world faces requires more than an acknowledgement that climate change is a great threat, planetary boundaries are being overstretched and poverty is bad. This is only the preamble to that story. It was written 20 years ago at the first Rio Earth Summit, which was two weeks long. This year’s Summit will last only three days.</p><p>The debate was a good snapshot of the wide spectrum of political positions represented in the UK Parliament. There will be a much broader range of interests – and divergences –represented at the Summit itself. It wouldn’t be hard for a room full of politicians to fill the best part of three days with reiterations of the preamble and vague confidences that improved reporting mechanisms could be enough to catalyse major shifts in corporate behavior.</p><p>If Rio+20 is going to move beyond an equally superficial and inconclusive discussion, delegates will need to come, not just with expressions of concern and ambition, but to focus on learning from the 20 years of initiatives that this process has already produced, to generate meaningful evidence-based policy discussions.</p>kate.munro@iied.org (Kate Munro)https://www.iied.org/moving-beyond-preamble-creating-new-story-rio20Thu, 24 May 2012 15:09:05 +0100International Institute for Environment and Development - All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Development and the Environment (APPGIDE)<p>There’s great divergence amongst UK MPs on their ambitions for the upcoming Rio+20 Summit, a Parliamentary debate chaired by journalist Jon Snow revealed this week.</p>Making sure the poor benefit from ecosystem serviceshttps://www.iied.org/making-sure-poor-benefit-ecosystem-services
<div class="field field-name-field-standfirst"></div><p>Palm wine, bat stew and carbon markets all made it into the same discussion in Parliament last night – likely for the first time.</p>
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<p>Investigators on the <a href="http://www.espa.ac.uk/">Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA)</a>, an interdisciplinary research programme which draws together physical scientists, social scientists and economists to examine how ecosystem services support human security, health and wellbeing met with Stephen O’Brien, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development at a meeting of the <a href="http://www.appgide.org/">All Party Parliamentary Group for International Development and the Environment (APPGIDE)</a>.</p>
<p>Tapping palm wine from palm trees is a concrete example, provided by <a href="http://www.ids.ac.uk/index.cfm?objectid=BB000B1B-5056-8171-7BB6B393712B64AE">Professor Melissa Leach</a>, an <a href="http://www.espa.ac.uk/">ESPA</a> Investigator from the University of Sussex’ Institute of Development Studies, of how some of the poorest people living in Africa benefit from ecosystems. ESPA’s key objective is to empower communities to better manage and benefit from ecosystems in the future.</p>
<p>A major theme of <a href="http://www.espa.ac.uk/">ESPA’</a>s work is to use ecology, epidemiology and social science to understand how land use and the degradation of natural habitats affects communities and what measures can be taken to reduce vulnerability to disease. An ecosystems approach is essential because ecological changes affect pathogen dynamics, which then affect people. To effectively reduce risk, people’s dependence on certain practices to make a living need to be understood to evaluate the trade-offs that have to be made to reduce infection rates.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.ids.ac.uk/index.cfm?objectid=BB000B1B-5056-8171-7BB6B393712B64AE">Professor Melissa Leach</a>’s presentation revealed that 60% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic – transmitted from animals to humans. She said that these diseases are re-emerging due to increasing levels of poverty.</p>
<p>She gave the example of Henipavirus in Ghana. It’s carried by bats and can be transmitted to people through their diet. Ghana’s urban poor are those most likely to eat bat stew and are therefore most susceptible to the virus. She also said pregnant women in Sierra Leone’s farming communities are vulnerable to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lassa_fever">Lassa fever</a>, which is transmitted by contact with rat feces or urine and is eaten some places as a delicacy. Changing land use patterns, leading to the degradation of natural habitats, can, she explained, have major impacts on the transmission of zoonotic diseases.</p>
<p>Dr James Kairo, ESPA Investigator and Principle Researcher at the <a href="http://www.kmfri.co.ke/">Kenyan Marine and Fisheries Research Institute</a>, explained how mangroves provide communities with several critical ecosystem services. They provide charcoal and building materials, coastal protection from fierce tropical storms and flooding and capture carbon. However, around the world, mangroves have been heavily degraded, cut down for timber and/or used as farm land and over fished.</p>
<p>With a global shift in focus towards climate change mitigation though, there is now a new constituency of stakeholders with an interest in seeing degraded mangroves restored, and new forests created. He is working on a project in Kenya that will see the development of a new 117 hectare mangrove forest, potentially made sustainable through carbon markets.</p>
<p>Making carbon into a commodity can bring its own problems, as was highlighted in the audience discussion. It gives national governments title to the carbon sequestered in a country’s soils and forests for the purposes of trading on international carbon markets, which could pose an additional barrier to the efforts of individuals and poor rural communities to demarcate, and gain title to the land on which their livelihoods depend.</p>
<p>Professor Katrina Brown, a Professor of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia, and co-Chair of the ESPA International Programme Advisory Committee, referred to The <a href="http://www.maweb.org/">Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA)</a> which revealed that in the last 50 years, humans have transformed ecosystems more rapidly than ever before. The growing demand for food, fuel and timber threatens to severely undermine the aim of eradicating global poverty, she said.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.espa.ac.uk/">ESPA</a>’s key objective is to empower communities to manage ecosystems and accrue their benefits but, as Dr Bhaskar Vira, ESPA Investigator and Senior Lecturer at Cambridge, pointed out, there are always winners and losers in the allocation of resources.</p>
<p>This is the key challenge facing <a href="http://www.espa.ac.uk/">ESPA</a>: to ensure the poor are the winners, reaping most benefit from new policies and practices.</p>
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kate.munro@iied.org (Kate Munro)https://www.iied.org/making-sure-poor-benefit-ecosystem-servicesWed, 8 Feb 2012 23:08:23 +0000International Institute for Environment and Development - All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Development and the Environment (APPGIDE)Moving climate talks forward: new parliamentary group consider the optionshttps://www.iied.org/moving-climate-talks-forward-new-parliamentary-group-consider-options
<div class="field field-name-field-standfirst"><p>Global climate negotiations are at an impasse. How can we get around it? A new All-Party Parliamentary Group discusses the options</p></div><p>Last week (Tuesday 23 November), the Development and Environment Group of Bond launched a new All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for international development and the environment. The group hopes to nurture discussion to ensure that development policy is rooted in environmental stewardship and that environment policy takes full account of the needs of the poor.</p><p>The new group marked its birth by hosting a lively seminar — attended by 60 people, including 18 lords and members of parliament — on the expected outcomes of the upcoming climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, and their implications for the poor.</p><p>Guest speakers from across the world of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) began by highlighting the links between environment, climate change and poverty eradication. David Norman, the World Wildlife Fund’s director of campaigns, said “the impacts of climate change will happen through natural resources...on which many, many hundreds of millions of poor people depend.” He described a small Brazilian village on the banks of the Amazon that relies almost exclusively on the river and forest for their food, water, medical supplies and livelihoods.</p><p>Laura Webster, head of policy at Tearfund, told the meeting that climate change can be devastating to development — she described small-scale farmers in Africa that are losing their livelihoods because they cannot adapt to changing rainfall patterns.<br /> </p><p><strong>An impossible impasse?</strong></p><div style="width: 190px; float: right; margin-left: 10px;"><img alt="“Why are we stuck?” asked Michael Meacher, MP" class="image" src="/files/meacher.jpg" style="width: 179px; height: 200px;" /><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">“Why are we stuck?” asked Michael Meacher, MP.</span></div><p>It may be clear that action on climate change is needed, but are we likely to get it? <a href="/general/staff/camilla-toulmin">Camilla Toulmin</a>, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, thinks not any time soon. She said that while we can expect some progress in Cancun on a few issues such as REDD+, there is little hope of negotiators striking a global deal.</p><p>The question, according to Michael Meacher, Labour MP, is why? And what can we do about it? He reminded the meeting that we are at an impasse in global negotiations. “If the evidence is so clear — and it is — why are we stuck? Why aren’t governments doing so much more?” he asked.</p><p>He then challenged the room to find ways around the impasse. “What are the alternative ways by which we can get the best movement, bearing in mind that the most obvious channels are closed?”<br /> </p><p><strong>Communication, communication, communication</strong></p><p>There was no shortage of suggestions. Some came from Meacher himself, including the idea of international, large-scale consumer boycotts organised by key NGOs working together. Others came from the floor — according to peer John Montagu what we really need is a carbon tax that significantly increases the price of using oil and makes ordinary consumers feel the pinch in their shopping bag.</p><p>The key speakers also made suggestions. Jude Mackenzie, the associate director of advocacy and communications at Christian Aid, said that “the only way forward is the massive shift in public opinion that is necessary to cause democratic governance and business to change”. This means mobilising voters and consumers in the developed world. NGOs can help by, for example, working in churches to communicate the importance of action on climate change.</p><div style="width: 150px; float: right; margin-left: 10px;"><img alt="A ‘four degree world’ could increase temperatures by 12 degrees in some regions" class="image" src="/files/fourdegree.jpg" style="width: 140px; height: 140px;" /><span style="font-size: 0.8em;">A ‘four degree world’ could increase temperatures by 12 degrees in some regions<br />Credit: <a href="http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2009/mapping-climate-impacts">Met Office</a></span></div><p>The media also has a big role to play in galvanising people into action. “What we’re getting from the media at the moment is a 50/50 message — as if 50 per cent of experts think climate change is a problem and 50 per cent think it isn’t — but we know that the statistics are nothing like that and what the media should be saying is that climate change is a massive problem and nearly everybody who knows what they’re talking about thinks so”, said Mackenzie.</p><p>Toulmin agreed on the need for better communication, particularly when it comes to the potential consequences of climate change. For example, by the end of this century, we could well be living in a world that is hotter by, on average, 4°C. But this does not, as some people think, mean that everywhere will warm by only four degrees. “A ‘four degree world’ gives you temperature rises of 5, 8, 10, 12 degrees in many parts of the land surface... which is horrific,” explained Toulmin. “We somehow have to find a way in which we can communicate much better the consequence of what might otherwise look like quite reasonable impacts,” she said.<br /> </p><p><strong>Scare tactics</strong></p><p>Toulmin offered an alternative approach to get round the impasse. “Rational argument has its limits,” she said. But the rising interest in the ‘green economy’ could make countries act. “We have been asking ourselves how we can use the energy that China, for example, has for its incredibly ambitious low carbon growth plans to frighten Europe and the United States that they’re going to be left out of the 21st century economy”.</p><p>Both Europe and the United States have much to fear from not being on top of the green industrial innovations happening in China and elsewhere. China is investing heavily in a new generation of power stations incorporating clean coal technologies, and wind, solar and biomass technologies are developing rapidly. Toulmin hopes that there are now enough people in the US innovation sector worried about being left behind to put real pressure on the US administration and counterbalance ‘older’ industries such as coal and gas.</p><p>It is clear that there are no easy means of achieving an international agreement on climate change. But even if expectations of the Cancun talks are low, the discussion at Tuesday’s meeting shows we have not run out of options yet. A global deal on climate change could still be possible and there are still plenty of opportunities for NGOs — and MPs — to play a role in making it happen.</p>nick.turner@iied.org (Nick Turner)https://www.iied.org/moving-climate-talks-forward-new-parliamentary-group-consider-optionsTue, 30 Nov 2010 14:20:44 +0000International Institute for Environment and Development - All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Development and the Environment (APPGIDE)<p>Global climate negotiations are at an impasse. How can we get around it? A new All-Party Parliamentary Group discusses the options</p>